


The Magic Fish

by DragonHawthorn (orphan_account)



Category: The Fisherman And His Wife (Brothers Grimm Folk Tale)
Genre: Gen, I genuinely have no idea why I'm posting this here, and I wanted to share it, it was an assessment task?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 08:40:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8243186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/DragonHawthorn
Summary: Hundreds of years later, wishes are still being granted.





	

 

Nora was trying to pretend it hadn’t happened when it suddenly started again. The roar of a thousand voices whispering, screaming, laughing, weeping, pounding on the inside of her skull, thinking everything from the inane to the life-changing – not that Nora could distinguish any one person’s thoughts from the others.

Okay, so she had wished to read minds. She hadn’t meant it like this! What good was a power she couldn’t control? And what was worse, the stupid magic fish that had granted her wish seemed to be long gone. She slammed her fist against the rough cliff face, unaware of the couple above peering down curiously.

“Come back! Come back and undo it you dumb sea slug!” she roared, punctuating each syllable with another punch, but the only reply she got was the angry swish of the waves.

Nora kicked the sand in a blind rage. If it wouldn’t come back, she’d just have to go to it. She plunged into the icy cold waves and was immediately assaulted with the anger and disappointment of every person within ten kilometres. The pain of it brought her to her knees as a particularly huge wave came rushing into the shallows to meet her, but she held her ground and fought her way upwards and onwards. The sharp sting of the salt and the bitter chill were nothing to the agony in her mind. Nora pushed on, struggling against the two-metre-high waves and swimming with a practiced breaststroke when she lost her footing and was swept out past her depth. She couldn’t see, eyes streaming, nose burned by the frothing seawater. Another burst of pain crashed through her, and this time did not subside – but the voices she heard this time seemed to be snatched from moments in time when people she knew were angry or sad or disappointed with her, denouncing her and insulting her. Nora pushed on, a good two hundred metres out now despite the rapidly worsening conditions, when suddenly she felt something wrap around her hands. She tried to pull them above the surface, but found she couldn’t. Plunging her head underneath the water, she realised they were wrapped in some kind of thick seaweed which seemed to Nora to have the tensile strength of steel and the razor-sharp edges of a diamond, leaving deep gashes in her wrists, the blood floating around her head like dark red fog, light-headedness threatening to overwhelm her. With her head underwater, struggling against the weed, Nora didn’t see the huge wave, at least three times as tall as she was, appearing from nowhere, slamming her back and down into a submerged rock. The voices were louder than ever, the agony threatening to burst her head, but it was growing more and more distant now… and through the blackness threatening to close in on her, Nora thought she saw a flash of red as bright and striking as the fish’s scales… but maybe it was the blood trickling into her eyes…

 

***

_The Bay Chronicle, June 16 th, 1916_

A hundred years ago today, a local girl named Nora Thripp drowned in Benford Bay. Her body was dredged up a few days after she disappeared, but no one ever knew why a local who was experienced with the sea went out in such bad conditions, or why both her hands were missing, raggedly torn off by the rocks.

 

***

Lily Jean knew the legend, everyone did – that the girl who drowned, the one whose memorial bench stood on the walking path overlooking the bay, had seen a fairy and that it had cursed her. Seeking to break the curse, Nora had swum out into the sea and drowned. There were many versions, some of them involving a genie, others a witch, some even a magic crab.

Ridiculous.

Lily Jean lay on the rock, the tide pulling out as the first light of the day landed on her face. She slowly sat up, knowing she had to get home to chores and homework and her job helping in the family café. Just as she was about to scramble down the slippery boulder, a strange sight caught her eyes.

A pitch-dark fish was leaping around like a dolphin in the water in front of her rock. She leaned over the edge of the boulder to get a closer look and realised it was jumping to keep itself away from something horrible. Something appearing and disappearing among the waves. Something that looked like – that couldn’t be – it was! A disembodied pair of hands, the flesh floating off, drained of all blood by years, maybe decades of being in the water. The hands were clutching at the fish whenever it entered the water, tearing at it as though trying to get something from it, or maybe just wreak horrible damage. As Lily Jean stared the fish’s leaps became more and more infrequent as it stayed in the water longer, writhing and struggling but coming closer to defeat with every fall. Finally she couldn’t bear to watch it any more. On its next jump Lily caught it just before its descent began, and then the race was on to get it as far from the hands as possible before it began to drown in the air, its gills flapping pathetically. She slid straight down the barnacle-encrusted rock, tearing her clothes and grazing her hands, and sprinted across the beach towards the pier. If she could get a running start she could probably lob it off the end of the pier at least twenty metres, she thought desperately. She kept going as fast as she could, feeling its heartbeat slowing down and putting on an extra burst of speed. She was afraid to look back but if she had, she would have seen the hands just a few metres behind her and gaining speed all the time. Just as Lily reached the end of the pier one of them caught her foot. Lily Jean’s head hung over the end of the pier, her jaw was throbbing, no doubt there was already a bruise forming after her spectacular face-plant. She was more worried about the fish. Its heartbeat was weakening and then – there. It had stopped. Lily dropped the fish, partially in shock, partially in defeat. As she gazed down at its limp form, a tear forming in her eye, she realised the fish was quivering, wobbling, resisting the ebb and flow of the tide. A smile broke out on her face when it began to swim properly – and then it stuck its head out of the water.

“Thank you! You have saved my life, and this shall not pass unrewarded. I am a magic fish! I will grant you one wish!” the fish crowed. Lily slowly raised a fist and punched herself in the side of the head. This could not be happening. She must have some kind of concussion from hitting her head on the pier. She rubbed her eyes, tipped some seawater out of her ears – how had it gotten there, she wondered idly – and looked again. The fish was still there, looking at her expectantly.

“What do you want, most?” it prompted. Lily blinked, part of her mind still reeling, the other part racing just as she had been only a few minutes ago. She imagined the chores waiting for her at home, the homework, the waitressing. It seemed like the only time she was free of responsibilities was in the mornings before the sun came up, when she lay on her rock, sometimes with a book, other times with her sketchpad and watercolours or embroidery, sometimes just watching the stars. Before anyone came to the beach, when she was all alone, she was invisible. No one could ever come and find her then – even her parents only got up at sunrise.

“I wish… I could be invisible,” she said hesitantly, and there was a flash of red light and the fish was gone. Lily lay there a moment longer, trying to make sense of what had happened. She slowly sat up, then, head swimming, lay back down again. She put her hand up to pinch the bridge of her nose… and suddenly realised she couldn’t see her hand. Or her nose.  Or her legs or her body or her hair or… or her anything. Lily Jean fell off the pier.

Treading water, small, brown, insignificant fish swimming straight past her like they didn’t realise she was there, Lily Jean tried to work out what to do. But was there really a choice she needed to make there? She was _invisible_. She had a free day, and even if her power was gone tomorrow, or she was forced to stay within her parents’ sight for a year, or _something_ , she would use it today. As the first tourists appeared on the beach, Lily raced around, enjoying the freedom she had when no one could see her. After a little while, she realised that she wasn’t leaving any footprints; it was as if her feet were simply passing through the sand like a ghost’s. As she sat down on a rock to catch her breath, Lily suddenly became aware that she wasn’t sitting on the boulder she had chosen as a seat: she was PASSING THROUGH IT. Panic set in as she tried to push herself away – because it had to be a hologram of some kind, or something, right? But as she scrabbled with her hands in the sand, she realised that she was passing through that too. Adrenalin coursing through her body, she used her entire weight to fling herself out of the rock towards the cliffs. Luckily she still seemed to have her entire body weight – but maybe it wasn’t so lucky, because as she stopped short in front of the cliffs, she began to rapidly sink into the sand. She stood up, trying not to lose her balance, and suddenly realised she was solid again. More than anything, Lily Jean wanted her mother.

“Help!” she wailed, but no sound came out of her mouth. She could see that the waves were getting bigger, angrier, the families and couples who had been on the beach getting up and leaving before it started raining. She ran after one of the families. “Please!” She begged, her voice wavering on and off as though the sound itself were switching between visible and invisible. But though one child looked back as though he heard something, his parents quickly ushered him towards the steps leading up to the car park. Her feet sinking into the sand again, Lily Jean ran, leaped and scrambled through the beach to reach the sea.  She looked hopelessly out into the distance; surely the fish wouldn’t have left? Scanning the horizon, she was about to give up when she saw a shadow in the water near the shore. The fish’s head poked out of the water, and Lily saw one of the hands leap out of the water onto it. Then she realised that the hands she had been so terrified of had been trying to stop the fish – perhaps even save her. Maybe they had once belonged to another victim of the fish – one Lily had been thinking about only a few minutes before the fish appeared.

Just before the fish disappeared below the surface, however, Lily Jean noticed that it wasn’t looking through her, or near her. It was looking _at_ her.

Could it see her?

She jumped into the wave without a second thought. If it could see her, it must be able to reverse the wish, right? Although the waves were more powerful than could really be called safe, there was no point staying on land if she was in such an unstable condition.

Although Lily Jean wasn’t the best swimmer, the constant fluctuations between solid and ectoplasm-like substance meant that although she couldn’t swim all the time, the waves couldn’t push her back either. She was only a little way past her death when she stopped being able to feel her limbs. Were they invisible in her own body, so that even her nerve endings were disconnected, or was that just the cold of the water? The waves were getting bigger and bigger the further out she got, but through the tears streaming in her salt-stung eyes, Lily couldn’t bring herself to care. She would find the fish, or die trying. Just as she thought she might have seen a flash of black as dark as the fish’s scales, a wave caught her off-guard, slamming her into a rock just in time for the momentum to carry her de-solidifying head through a rock. Panicking, realising that if she became solid inside the rock it would be the end of her, Lily pulled her head out of the rock – just in time to save all of her head except her jaw, which stayed in the rock. As the blood floated free from her arteries, tongue lolling around until all she could taste was her own visible blood, her body pulsing between visible and invisible for the first time, in time with the beat of her struggling heart.

And then the dark murky green of the sea and the vivid red of the blood gave way to blackness, and Lily Jean sank the short distance to the sea bed, to be carried back to shore with the tide.

 

***

“Much mystery surrounds the unsolved murders of two girls, which occurred almost exactly a hundred years apart in Benford Bay, South Australia. Nora Thripp’s drowned, mutilated body was found on the 21st of June, 1816, just four days after her disappearance on the 17th. Both her hands were missing, severed cleanly off. Lily Jean Evangelini’s body, found almost a century later, washed up in the middle of the public beach just two days after her disappearance on the 17th of June, 1916, with the jaw torn off. Locals and tourists alike have long speculated on whether the two deaths were connected, despite the time gap. The coincidence in dates and mutilated state of the bodies is often cited as evidence for this theory, but the only conceivable explanations are organised crime, copycat criminals or – the most widely believed “possibility” – some form of magic. This ranges from an immortal serial killer to some kind of genie or fairy who tempts unwitting victims into the sea somehow. The possibility of another death, this one occurring in 2016, is anticipated as proof of this myth. See Chapter Four: Disappearances for more information.”

–Emily Balder’s _Myths of the Bay_ , 2004

***

Toby’s old shirt fluttered in the wind as he looked up from his book to gaze across the bay. There couldn’t be that many people who really thought it was magic. After all, wasn’t it more likely that it really _had_ been a copycat criminal?

Something caught his attention in his peripheral vision. Getting up and walking around the boulder he was sheltered behind, he realised it was a dark green fish lying on the sand looking like the oddest piece of seaweed he had ever seen. Its eyes, black with horizontal red pupils, were bulging, its tattered fins pinned down by three pale, odd-shaped rocks that seemed to be struggling to hold it down as it writhed, its open mouth gasping for air.

But _were_ they rocks?

Toby tiptoed closer, despite his mind’s incessant screaming to run away, what are you doing, just leave it, it’s just a fish. And the closer he got, the more the rocks looked like – no – but yes – they were – two ragged, mutilated hands and a bleach-white pair of jawbones. An image of the two memorial benches that stood side by side by the walking track flashed through his mind, but he banished it with a shake of his head and stepped towards the scuffle.

No matter what the predator was, Toby had always been on the side of the prey.

 


End file.
